Pat was my best friend in high school. He had recently just started going steady with Mary and Mary thought it would be fun to fix me up with her friend Claire. I was never a fan of fix-ups, but Pat persuaded me to go along. “It will make Mary happy,” he said. “And besides, dude, Claire is totally hot!” So I reluctantly agreed to the fix-up. Big mistake!
The night of the big double date came. Claire was indeed a babe, but I didn’t really sense much chemistry between her and me, so I was kind of glad when the night came to an end.
Pat and I had just dropped off our dates and we were heading back to our neighborhood when a car pulled up next to mine at a quiet intersection. The driver honked his horn and both Pat and I looked over and saw a guy in the front passenger seat move his hand and arm in a circular motion, signaling me to roll down my car’s window, which I did.
“Are you the dickheads who were out with Claire and Mary tonight?” The guy asked.
“Oh shit,” Pat exclaimed. “Hit the gas.” I punched it, but the engine of my 1961 Chevy Corvair trembled and I felt the car lurch forward a few feet before the engine sputtered and the car came to a halt.
My stalled car was now surrounded by four rather large, thuggish-looking guys. One of them on Pat’s side of the car asked “Which one of you assholes was with Claire tonight?” Without hesitation, the guy I thought was my best friend pointed towards me.
“You, huh?” said a voice coming from my side of the car. I turned my head around to look at the guy who was talking just in time to feel a fist punch me hard in the mouth. “Stay the fuck away from her or next time you’ll wake up dead.” With that, he and his buddies jumped back into their car and sped away.
I was literally seeing stars. The pain was intense and I felt blood running down my chin from my mouth. I looked in the car’s rear view mirror and saw that I was missing one of my front teeth and the other was loose and almost hanging by a thread.
“What the fuck?” I said, looking at Pat.
“Yeah, sorry dude,” he said. “I probably should have told you that Claire’s married. The guy who hit you is her husband.”
“You probably should have told me? Are you fucking kidding me? Why would you and Mary want to fix me up with a married woman?”
“I dunno,” Pat said, shrugging his shoulders. “Mary said Claire wasn’t happy in her marriage. It seemed like, you know, a good idea at the time.”
This post was written for the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver prompt in which Stephanie Colpron invites us to write a tale about a mistake and how we grew/learned from it even though it felt like something insurmountable. A true experience or a fictional story.
Sadly, this is a true story and I learned two things from this experience. First, never to go out on a fix-up date ever again. Second, always make sure, before asking a girl out on a date, that she’s not married.
This, That, and The Other 
you should put these in a book!
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Titled “Fandango’s Biggest Mistakes,” right?
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How not to get slapped?
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That was a colossal mistake.
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Easy for him to say. He didn’t lose his teeth. Good one! 🙂
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Oy Vey. A hard lesson to learn.
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I never dated a married woman before, but there is something about it that sounds hot.
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and dangerous
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Hahaha great twist on why the guy was so mad!
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I’ve had scrapes with ex-boyfriends, but not husbands. Best friends? It’s true sometimes we are better off without them.
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My best friendship went downhill after that night.
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Some friend Fandango!
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Seriously.
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I married someone who, years before I met him, made the mistake of interpreting “separated” (and living across an ocean) as available. He awoke with a broken nose and his blood all over a room one night. This was a superior officer’s wife. Ouch!
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Ouch indeed!
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I have only had one person that I called “best friend”, and she was not a very good one. I think some of my best friends have been people I have never met in person before. The positive side for you on this story is that you learned a lot about a person you thought was your friend and grew from it.
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That’s a friend? Glad he’s not one of mine
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With friends like that who needs enemies!
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